A small group of audience members surveils a dancer who is simultaneously: 1) watching reenactments of scenes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2) participating in a mash-up of some of the most canonical social science experiments of the last 50 years. Occasionally, an eight-foot-high wooden wheel assists dancers as they rotate in the sagittal plane with their nose as the axis. Each rotation tests the viability of the constructed environment the dancers inhabit and allows the audience to reconsider the nature of stability. Knee aprons, one-way surveillance glass, Mormon temple rituals, and a wooden bikini help prepare the audience for shifts in perspective and other revelations related to death.

Performances of The Rehearsal Artist for American Realness 2018 are made possible with support from The Invisible Dog Art Center, Performance Space 122, Gibney Dance and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

The Rehearsal Artist is a National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network (NPN/VAN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Performance Space 122 in partnership with The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, On The Boards, Women and Their Work, University of Colorado Boulder and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information: www.npnweb.org Additional support for The Rehearsal Artist was provided in part by The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Rehearsal Artist was developed in part by Live Arts Bard at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University, as well as the Center for Humanities in the Arts and IRISS Project Society research funding at the University of Colorado Boulder
Photo by Julieta Cervantes courtesy of Live Arts Bard

Though not a licensed scientist, technologist, or carpenter, Michelle Ellsworth nevertheless co-mingles these disciplines with dance in an attempt to choreograph coping strategies and wood-based and web-based solutions to peculiar geopolitical (and personal) phenomena. The pharmaceutical potential of dance, as well as labor-intensive ideas inform her work.